In the following essay, Gross asserts that the narrative remarks which frame La Fontaine's story Psyché are meant to draw the reader's attention to the powerful effects of both nature and art on human emotion.

La Fontaine's longest tale, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, is his most ambitious completed work.1 Like the unfinished Songe de Vaux, it utilizes a mixed style of prose and verse. For structure, however, there is no comparable work by him or any other classical French writer. La Fontaine set Apuleius' tale in a frame constantly held before the reader in Part I and recalled occasionally in Part II. In the Golden Ass, Apuleius also used a frame for the tale: to comfort a young woman captured by bandits, their old slave narrates the religious allegory...